Category: Writing

Art can be an extremely personal thing– the manifestation of an idea that originated inside of the deepest part of your psyche.

I’ve had the extreme pleasure of working on on film and video projects for the past 20 years, and I understand the importance of collaboration. As much as I want to write, shoot, direct, and edit (and I have on several projects)– it’s just not practical to think one person can be successful in all of these roles (Although we can all find an example to prove me wrong: Charlie Chaplin, etc). And at the end of the day, it’s just not necessary.

If you surround yourself with competent contributors who you trust to pull their own weight on a project, you have more energy to hone-in and focus on specific portions of the project. More importantly, when you lean on others to help produce a piece of art, the end result is an amalgamation of ideas and input from various perspectives.

I wrote a feature length script in four months and it was terrifying …but I loved it.

I’ve put off writing my first feature for a long time. So much that I was worried I would stop growing as a writer if I didn’t do it soon. Five years of writing scripts that are fifteen pages or less gave me a lot of experience in the fundamentals, but little in way of setting up a larger story. I knew that this had to change.
So, I signed up for a class centered around writing a feature script in a single semester. It was a small class, less than ten of us after some people dropped. When the professor began the first day, he started by telling us two things:

This will be your most time-consuming class of the semester by a longshot

Don’t expect to finish this class with a perfect script that’s ready to be sold and/or shot.

In hindsight this was the best possible introduction we could have had for what was to come.

The first three weeks of class were dedicated to preparation. When you’re aiming to write 120 pages in such a short amount of time, your story structure needs to be solid. Mine wasn’t. I wasn’t used to doing weeks of prep before opening final draft. We focused on character driven stories as well which, again, I wasn’t the strongest with. Continue reading “Feature Length Script in 4 Months!”→